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Eating Shane Ivey in Prototype

"Dr. Shane Ivey" is one of the many people Alex Mercer can consume in Activision's Prototype.

By SHANE IVEY

Four or five years ago, I was on the phone with my friend and business partner, Dennis Detwiller. In our spare time we run a role-playing game publishing company together. He had just hired on with a video game studio in Vancouver, British Columbia, and had put together concepts for half a dozen games that they were going to review.

He didn't have much reason to expect any one of them would ultimately get made, considering all the hoops a video game has to jump through before it sees the inside of a console, but it was certainly fun hearing about the ideas.

One of them was for a horror-action game inspired by John Carpenter's "The Thing" and the horror stories of H.P. Lovecraft. Dennis was really excited about it. "It's a hunt for a shapechanging monster," he said, "only the player is the monster."

Sure enough, one by one, those concepts fell away. Some of them didn't make it past the pitch meeting. Another went away when a licensing deal fell through. Another got months of hard development work before its own licensing deal fell through. Then Activision bought the studio and killed half the games they had in development.

But that one about the monster, it stayed alive. It just wouldn't die. It changed, evolved and overcame every obstacle in its path. Focus groups, massive playtests, larger focus groups, market studies, executive meetings, it consumed them all. It became not just Dennis' idea but the brainchild of dozens of smart writers, programmers, artists and designers.

Today, I'm playing that game on my Playstation 3. It's called Prototype, and it's sold something like umpteen gazillion copies worldwide.

I feel a little like a proud uncle, seeing Prototype leave the studio and rampage around the planet. I remember it when it really was just a gleam in its creator's eye.

But I have even more reason than that to feel proud. When you're playing the game, if you look in the right places, you can eat me.

No, that's not some crass insult. Stop composing that letter to the editor. Go play Prototype and look for Dr. Shane Ivey in midtown Manhattan. You can devour him, absorb his memories, and learn a clue about Black Watch's nefarious secret programs.

See, my friend Dennis wrote most of Prototype's cutscenes. He needed hundreds of character names, and he figured it would be fun to use people he knew. So now you can eat me. But only in the game.

You know, it's interesting. About ten years ago another friend named a character after me in a novel, and that guy got his brain eaten for his memories, too. Hmmm.

But I guess that's another story.

Shane Ivey is a freelance writer for The News, and he's probably going to need salt when you eat him. Read our review of Prototype.